Aquatech’s Devesh Sharma was featured in IDA Global Connections Spring Issue. Devesh, who is co-chairman of the EEC, was asked “In your opinion, what are the most pressing issues and opportunities regarding environmental stewardship in the field of advanced water treatment as it relates to meeting growing industrial water needs?” His response, which was featured in the magazine reads,
“The pressing issues for industry include managing the cost of discharge, addressing reliability as feed water quality sources worsen, and balancing the costs of environmental stewardship while ensuring continued economic viability and profitable operations.
Where industrial end-users once simply discharged their waste water, the opportunities to continue this practice are dwindling. This is either because of more stringent regulation, increased costs to discharge, or in most cases, both. To compound this, the accessibility to abundant and fresh water sources for operations is constantly thinning.
This evolving landscape provides some unique opportunities to apply advanced water treatment technology specifically, increased recycle and reuse. The improvement of various membrane technologies has made the complete recycling of any industrial effluent possible. This water can be used for virtually any application, from cooling tower make up to ultrapure water. A great example of this is Kuwait, where the waste reject from one of the largest sewage recycle facilities in the world is being treated ted and recycled into very high purity water for oil field development.
Recycling industrial waste water is not new, but doing so and improving overall economics is. This is the inflection point that will catapult the water reuse industry. There is a lot of ongoing development work to reduce energy consumption, reduce chemical consumption, and make membranes and consumables last longer. All of this is directly linked to environmental sustainability improvement. The next horizon will be converting waste to valuable resources, for example, recovering valuable minerals from the concentrated brine streams generated from water reuse.
This just the tip of the iceberg for industrial water management. The biggest opportunity is applying the ongoing developments in advanced water technology to be an enabler for an industrial end user’s core operations. Purer water can lead to better production yields and thus, more profits.
The intersection of water scarcity and increasing environmental regulations is increasing water risk for industry but tackled head on can be a great opportunity to reduce environmental discharge and fresh water usage costs, improve production yields with higher quality water, and exhibit world class environmental stewardship all at the same time.”
For more on IDA Global Connections Spring Issue, click here.
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